One of my older kid’s hipster friends introduced him to “The Man Who Sold The World” and he is super into it at the moment. I have been a Bowie fan since forever, but this song was slow to win me over. I have learned to love the song, but I struggle to connect to the weirdly airless original recording. The song (and album) didn’t make much of an impact at first. A few years after its release, Bowie convinced Lulu that she should cover it. He produced her recording, and he played saxophone on it too. Lulu’s version is almost ska-like. It went to #4 in the UK. Bowie continued to reinterpret th ..read more

I’m writing about this song at the request of my friend Benjie de la Fuente, but also because my kids like it. (They have liked David Bowie since seeing Labyrinth, but now they’re getting interested in his non-Labyrinth music too.) It makes sense that this tune would seize my son’s imagination, because he likes classical piano, and this is the most classical-sounding Bowie song. “Life On Mars?” is one of the coolest songs of all time, so it is very surprising that it shares an origin story with “My Way”, arguably the most uncool song of all time. The songs share some chord changes in common ..read more

The Beatles were not always a rock band, especially not when it came to the Paul songs. This is a frequently cited example of baroque pop, a cousin of “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home.” Paul is playing piano and clavichord, Ringo plays drums and maracas, and the delightfully-named Alan Civil plays the French horn. (He also played in the orchestra on “A Day In The Life.”) John and George were not involved. The recording is about B major, and is tuned about twenty cents flat. When I went to learn the song, I got suspicious of this key. It seemed more likely that Paul wrote and played it ..read more

This week in the Song Factory, we begin talking about the conventions of the blues. One central convention is the twelve-bar form. It’s so closely associated with the blues generally that jazz musicians use the term “a blues” to mean any tune using the twelve-bar form. However, it is surprisingly difficult to define what the twelve-bar blues actually is. That’s because there is no such thing as “the” twelve bar blues. There is a vast constellation of progressions and structures that share some structural features in common. In this post, I won’t even begin to list every variant; I’ll just some ..read more

The Beatles are so omnipresent that it’s easy to take them for granted. I answered a question on r/musictheory about that weird chord in the chorus of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and it made me remember that the song exists, that it’s super cool, and that it would be an interesting topic both for my music tech and songwriting students.  This song was famously assembled in the studio from multiple takes, and its production is quite complicated. Like many later Beatles psychedelic masterpieces, this ended up being more a piece of electronic music than rock. But before we get into the produ ..read more

Here’s a Grateful Dead song that I loved as a teenager. As with many things I loved as a teenager, I did not know why this spoke to me. Now I do, so I get to share that knowledge with you. “Althea” is a so-so Dead song based on an exquisite groove. The main riff is harmonically simple: Bm, A and E, implying E Mixolydian mode. Rhythmically, however, it’s subtle and intricate. Here’s my transcription of the version from “Without A Net”, which I consider to be canonical: I was able to figure out the notes and chords in this riff in a few minutes, but getting the rhythm down took me years. It’s ..read more

I wrote a lot of stuff this year! First, let’s talk about the big projects that I started in previous years but finished in 2022. The biggest one was my doctoral dissertation. Read the story of it here. Now I’m in the gradual process of adapting it into a more accessible format, probably a book aimed at music teachers. That’s percolating in the background. I also finished a book chapter about critical race theory in music education with Frank Abrahams. We started it quite a while ago, before CRT was a regular topic on Fox News and before conservative states started banned its teaching. We wer ..read more

A commenter on the last post informed me of a remarkable fact: for most of the twentieth century, Hohner harmonicas were tuned in just intonation, not twelve-tone equal temperament. This is surprising! Just about every fixed-pitch instrument in the Western world is tuned in 12-TET unless it’s highly specialized or esoteric. The most detailed information I can find on this subject is this post on a Hohner discussion forum. It says that before 1974, Hohner harmonicas were tuned in seven-limit just intonation. This doesn’t mean some weird Harry Partch tuning; Hohner used mostly five-limit in ..read more

I got a question from a Twitter friend: Oh @ethanhein, a blues tonality Q for you: On Muddy Waters’s “Double Trouble,” on the LP Sings Big Bill, James Cotton opens his harp solo w/a note so ripe it almost derails the record —yet somehow it works. My Q: what makes that note so bracing? Link: https://t.co/hu1hhpX2wV. — Calvert Morgan (@CalMorgan) November 28, 2022 Let’s find out! The note in question comes at 1:28. The solo is played by the great James Cotton. He begins it with a C-sharp, the major third in the song’s key of A. This would not seem to not be a very weird choice. But usually in ..read more

My first exposure to Marvin Gaye’s recording of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was on the The Big Chill soundtrack, which my baby boomer parents kept in heavy rotation. Here’s a live version. Nobody wore a glittery tux like Marvin Gaye. Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong wrote the tune in 1966. Marvin Gaye was not the first Motown artist to record it, or even the second. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles recorded it first. Marvin Gaye recorded his version next. Gladys Knight and the Pips recorded it third, and theirs was the first version to get released. If you only know Marvin Ga ..read more